Anthropic introduced Managed Agents, a hosted service that separates agent components — the brain (Claude and its harness), hands (sandboxes and tools), and session logs — into independent, replaceable interfaces. This decoupling architecture allows each component to fail or be updated independently, reduces time-to-first-token by up to 90%, and enables flexible scaling across multiple execution environments. The design follows the principle of virtualizing components similar to how operating systems abstract hardware, ensuring the system can accommodate future harnesses and tools not yet conceived.
